Tina Dura & Austin Gray's Microplastic Summer Research Experience

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research 1:29 Tina Dura & Austin Gray's Microplastic Summer Research Experience

By:

Spencer Coppage

8 Aug 2024 410

Professors Austin Gray and Tina Dura created a unique summer research program to train future environmental scientists. Students traveled to a marsh ecosystem, collected samples, and analyzed them for microplastics at Virginia Tech.

The microplastic summer research experience is allowing us to train a group of undergraduates in the methods of going into inner tidal marshes and reconstructing environmental change through time. And then looking at microplastics throughout those environmental changes through time. A lot of the work that's out there has focused on surface sediments, and what we're doing now is taking that information further back in time, seeing when microplastics first appeared in marshes, what kinds appeared and how that compares to what we're seeing today in those marsh environments. Students are getting a hands on or crash course experience in microplastic extraction. They're actually learning how to take a sample from a sediment core and identify what's natural? What's synthetic? What's a plastic? What's not a plastic? So as we figure out more and more about microplastics and how it affects humans, it always goes back to the environment. What we do to our environment, how we treat the environment has a direct effect on human health, meaning that if we continue to pollute, release plastics and not collect them, have litter, all that plastic that we discard into our environment ultimately ends up in our body in some way. And if we don't do a better job of protecting the environment, then we'll see a decline in the quality of life for humans.